Twaste the Rainbow

It would be hard to come up with a cheaper ad campaign: Mars' new fruit-candy promotion consists of redirecting its homepage to a Twitter search for "Skittles." Successful? Wildly.

A Skittles logo floats on top of the Twitter page, and sometimes Mars redirects to YouTube or Facebook instead of Twitter. The campaign is about as bargain-basement as you can get: Mars doesn't need a TV buy, ad agency or even much Web design work.

And Twitter users are, as planned, including the word "Skittles" in their posts in order to have the honor of appearing on the Skittles.com home page.

...In other words, Mars has reduced its advertising nearly, but not quite all the way, to mindless repetition of a single word. 

Not surprisingly, marketers (marketeers?) are skeptical of the risks Skittles is taking by hardly monitoring content about their product:

Other experts say Skittles is taking the wrong approach to social media. Instead of encouraging teens to have a conversation about Skittles, it is encouraging false conversations about the brand, says Shiv Singh, vice president and global social-media lead at Razorfish, a digital-marketing firm owned by Microsoft. "Everyone is having a field day and writing 'Skittles' on Twitter just to get attention," he says.

Sure enough, the site became the target of Internet pranks on Monday. The way the "Chatter" portion of the Skittles.com site is built, any Twitter user who mentions the word "Skittles" is featured on the homepage.

At least one Web site has been launched by pranksters encouraging Web users to post negative comments about the candy. The comments range from the thoughtful to the outlandish. "Skittles taste terrible. If you eat Skittles you support killing kittens and puppies," wrote a Twitter user named kingshane. (from The Wall Street Journal)

I personally think this demonstrates Skittles' complete understanding of social media ("  "), runaway negative commentary and all. There is nothing more nails-on-the-chalkboard than arts organizations' unnatural attempts to utilize Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc.. We Should Have a Blog, someone says at a staff meeting, and a blog on an organization's website on which press releases are posted once a month is launched. A marketing director's 15-year-old-son mentions "Facebook" at the dinner table, and suddenly there's an organization page devoid of voice. These sites need to be utilized the way they are intended to be utilized; they won't change for you! Identify what you specifically hope to achieve marketing-wise - beyond simply getting young butts in seats - and then figure out which sites fit best with your organization's unique personality and needs. You shouldn't launch a YouTube channel just because the ballet across the street has one; maybe Twitter works better for you. ["If the ballet company across the street told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"] And if there's no one on staff who can naturally participate in so-called social media, reach the youth of America some other way. Or, better yet, see if that marketing director's son needs an after-school job.

UPDATE, 5:30 pm on Thursday: Greg Sandow tells me that conductor Michael Christie is tweeting about how bad orchestras' Twitter pages are! Christie tweets, "Recently agreed to follow a few orchestras. Not sure how I feel about be bombarded with marketing stuff rather than people's thoughts." and then "Atlanta has picture of Spano. I want to hear from him not marketing people." I stand impressed by Christie's candor. Speaking of which, he's also just commented on a post over on Greg's blog, which is a dangerous game as we learned from Cleveland. A reader just asked if the Brooklyn Philharmonic has been paying him (!!!); someone page a publicist!